Domaine Tempier "La Tourtine" Bandol red 2022 MAGNUM

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Domaine Tempier "La Tourtine" Bandol red 2022 MAGNUM

RVF Guide to the Best Wines of France 2025 (Sept. 2024): 96/100. With its mineral delicacy and perfect concentration, La Tourtine is surprisingly approachable for its age: let’s bet it will close up. Less powerful, more elegant than usual, it reflects a winemaking process that took into account the warmth of the vintage to extract the best from perfectly ripe mourvèdre, refined in its extraction.

Technical sheet written by the domaine :

Near the village of Castellet, at an average altitude of 170 m, this fairly homogeneous clay-limestone terroir rests on Santonian soil approximately 100 million years old.

This terroir, where mourvèdre fully expresses itself, produces fruity and powerful tannic wines with between 70 and 80% Mourvèdre depending on the year. Often swept by the mistral, La Tourtine is particularly well exposed, resulting in a wine with great aging potential that always retains its aromas of red berries and spices, even after 10 to 15 years of aging.

La Tourtine is located on the hill of Castellet, where the vines grow on clay-limestone soils of the Santonian Valdonien type, the quintessential traditional terroir of the AOP Bandol. In these comfortable clays, during the height of summer, it sometimes happens that one can pass a hand or even a fist through the crevices caused by the retraction of the drying clays. This may come as a surprise but demonstrates that the vine has a fairly deep root system, which is one of the characteristics of La Tourtine. We are situated on a sunny and windy hillside, and it is probably the combination of all these factors that makes it one of the greatest terroirs of Bandol.

GRAPE VARIETIES: Mourvèdre (80%), Grenache (10%), Cinsault (10%). Average age of the vines is 40 years.

TERRIOR: 6.5 ha located south-facing on slopes in the municipality of Castellet. Homogeneous clay-limestone soil, Santonian era: 100 million years.

CULTIVATION: Traditional mechanical and manual soil work (on terraces), without herbicides. Reasoned monitoring of health status without the use of chemical molecules. Green harvesting to select the load of the vines and achieve a yield of 30 to 35 hl/ha.

HARVEST: Manual harvesting in 30 kg crates. Sorting in the vineyard and at the cellar.

VINIFICATION: Traditional vinification with total destemming and indigenous yeasts. Fermentation lasting 15 days to 3 weeks at regulated temperature in stainless steel or concrete tanks. Aging in oak foudres (25 to 75 hl) for 18 to 20 months with secondary fermentation known as malolactic. Bottling without fining or filtration.

TASTING: Beautiful density on the palate and a lovely minerality. A refined wine, with great aging potential.